Pony club anger over MP’s attack

DANIEL MERCER, The West Australian June 27, 2011, 2:35 am

National Party MP Max Trenorden has launched a scathing attack on the WA Pony Club Association after it forced a Wheatbelt club to stop holding events at the property of a convicted child sex offender.

In an extraordinary outburst under parliamentary privilege last week, Mr Trenorden accused the association of breaching its duty to an affiliated club and called for the resignation of its executive over the treatment of the Balkuling Horse and Pony Club, near Beverley.

The veteran MP and former National Party leader’s comments centred on the association’s order to move the Balkuling club after one of its former members and occupier of its premises, Murray Britza, was convicted of child sex offences.

Britza, a father of seven, was found guilty in the District Court in November of five counts of viewing child pornography after he accessed websites between November 2008 and July 2009.

Judge Philip McCann sentenced him to two 12-month suspended jail terms, placed him on an 18-month good behaviour bond and fined him $12,000 in relation to three other counts.

Association president Rose Pinter said Mr Trenorden’s remarks were defamatory and distressing and effectively defended the rights of a sex offender over the interests of the club and its members, most of whom were aged four to 25.

Mrs Pinter said it beggared belief that Mr Trenorden would use parliamentary privilege to question the association’s conduct and integrity, insisting it had a duty of care to ensure the safety of its members including children was not jeopardised.

She said the association had written to Mr Trenorden asking for an explanation and apology.

“We’ve acted according to good governance, the law and requirements by our constitution and policies and government legislation and regulation,” Mrs Pinter said.

“We find it really disturbing to be accused of doing the wrong thing when we have acted in exactly the right way.”

Responding to Mrs Pinter’s criticism, Mr Trenorden said Britza’s relationship with the club was “irrelevant” because he had been forced to resign as a member and the property on which he lived was no longer used to hold meetings.

Judge slams porn offender over denial

November 29, 2010 – 4:24PM

A Perth judge says a 63-year-old former teacher who viewed child pornography is deluding himself by maintaining he was the victim of a “computer gremlin”.

Murray William Britza, of Beverley, 130km east of Perth, was found guilty by a jury in the Perth District Court last month on five counts of accessing child pornography websites between November 2008 and June 2009.

The former president of the Pony Club Association of Western Australia was found not guilty on three other counts.

WA’s Corruption and Crime Commission gathered evidence against Britza by obtaining warrants to install hidden listening devices and a camera, then searching his house in July 2009, seizing a modem and computer.

During sentencing submissions in court on Monday, Judge Philip McCann said the evidence against Britza was convincing and he was “living a lie in maintaining his innocence”.

He said Britza would be better off admitting what he had done and get on with his life “instead of surrounding himself with this delusion that a computer gremlin did it”.

The judge accepted that only a small percentage of the child porn images found were in the worst category depicting very young children, but he said a custodial sentence was usual for the offences.

Any non-custodial sentence would have to be of “extreme severity” to reflect the seriousness of the crime and how the community regarded it, he said.

Such a fine might mean Britza would have to sell his farm, Judge McCann said.

Accessing child pornography was “encouraging, aiding and abetting child rapists and every image is a criminal offence”, he said.

“There’s a clandestine agenda driven by criminal monsters who feed off the support they get from people who view this material.”

Judge McCann said Britza himself was a victim in a sense.

He said he thought a psychiatric report on Britza could be wrong and questioned whether it wasn’t a case of undiagnosed depression in a middle-aged man leading to criminal behaviour.